


Waiting

by Unforgotten



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Extra Treat, F/F, Grief/Mourning, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-24 13:57:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17705531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: You're born to feed the dragon.No one ever tells you so, of course. It's not something your nursemaid whispers to you as you suckle at her breast. It's not something your tutor teaches you, when you learn your letters and numbers and wars. Rather, it's in the silences, in the spaces in-between. It's in the way your parents never come to your nursery, while they visit your sisters and brothers near-daily; it's in the way no one will ever answer you why, if you're the eldest, it's your next-younger sister being groomed for the throne.





	Waiting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



You're born to feed the dragon.

No one ever tells you so, of course. It's not something your nursemaid whispers to you as you suckle at her breast. It's not something your tutor teaches you, when you learn your letters and numbers and wars. Rather, it's in the silences, in the spaces in-between. It's in the way your parents never come to your nursery, while they visit your sisters and brothers near-daily; it's in the way no one will ever answer you why, if you're the eldest, it's your next-younger sister being groomed for the throne.

In the end, there's a book, taken from a forbidden room in an even more forbidden corridor. In it, you learn the rules that doom you: That you're the first daughter of the third generation. That you're to be given to the dragon when the intermediary comes for you, whether it's on your first birthday or your ninety-first. That it's this, somehow, that keeps the darkness at bay. More than your father's standing armies, more than your forefathers' deeds and conquests. You. Your flesh and bone and blood and life.

For the next fortnight, you bar yourself in your chambers, refusing to speak to anyone, refusing even to eat. By the time you leave again, you've decided you won't be doing that. Won't be submitting to your fate like a good little veal calf. What's it to you if a kingdom burns? It's never been yours anyway; it was some fool long-dead who sold you.

You run away fifteen times in the next three years. Each time, your father's guard brings you home, careful, oh-so-careful not to harm you. Each time, you vow to get farther, be gone for longer the next time, and you do. But it's never far enough, and you're never gone long enough, and eventually you must admit the empire is too vast for you to hope to flee beyond its reach even if you did manage to cross over its border.

From there, you decide: When the dragon comes for you, you won't go quietly.

For the next sixteen years, you learn the arts of war, everything the weapons master will teach you. It _is_ everything, for by then your father doesn't care what you do, as long as you do it at home; and as for your sister, the one who will be queen...she's nearly a woman grown, now, and you only got as far as you did the last five times because she helped you. Now, she helps you again, and every time you encounter resistance, resistance encounters her word, which may as well be law.

You're thirty-five when your father dies. Your sister is thirty-three. The crown suits her the way it didn't your father, and though she tells you she'll never send you to the dragon, it's in the first few years of her reign that you begin to wonder. Not whether you could bear it after all, but whether it would be worth it. This deal with the dragon is what keeps this kingdom standing; if it were ever to fall, its queen would be the first into the punishing fire.

The years go by, and with them the question waxes and wanes in your mind, long after you know the answer, long after it's been engraved in your heart in the image of your sister's face: in her frown when she sits upon the throne pondering some grave matter, and in her smile when she sees her own children, each as beloved as the next.

The years go by, and the decades, too, and one day you've become old, and your sister's children have become women and men in their own right, and your sister...

You visit her grave daily, even after the year of mourning has passed. The question's long since waned in your mind, a sliver of thought you rarely reach for unless prompted. Anything would have struggled to be seen, in the wake of your loss. You've never borne such loss before, for everyone else has always kept themselves at a remove, one your heart has always echoed. Only your sister ever held out her hand; only one person ever dared to love you so fiercely, and to accept your own love in return.

So you visit her grave daily; daily you weep until your eyes are swollen, so that you can hardly see your way back to your chambers. For the first time in your life, you're ready for the dragon to take you, though you don't know it until you go to the grave-site one day and find a feminine figure standing there. She turns to look at you, and what you see is a girl of about the age you were when you stole into a forbidden room to take your own answers. Her eyes are golden, her hair black, her lips and nails blacker still; she is so strange and so feral that you cannot help but know her at once.

"I'll say goodbye, first. Then we'll go," you say. There was never a time you would have phrased it as a question; it's just that once, you would have been stalling, looking for a way out. Now, you mean what you say, no less and no more.

"Don't take too long," says the girl, in a rusty, creaking voice. "The dragon is waiting for you."

As if some lizard's child can fool you; as if you haven't pored over every text a few dozen times and more, reading everything that's been written and everything that's merely been talked around. There are things you never saw when you were young, now as clear in your sight as the old horror once was.

"You'll wait as long as you must," you say, mildly, as you fall to your knees to speak to your sister for the last time. When a sound comes from behind you--an objection, whether it's to your knowledge or to the waiting itself--you raise your hand for silence, and receive it.

Several hours later, you follow the girl out of the garden and away from the palace. All who see you know your business; all scramble to clear the way, lest they keep the dragon's prize from it and thus incur its wrath.

In the next weeks, you barely speak, you to ask questions or the girl to answer them. There was a time you wouldn't have known why, nor accepted it; now you know the secrets that must not be spoken outside of the blank spaces...or at least not within the bounds of the kingdom. She is vulnerable here, and the more you observe her, the more you think she may really be as young as she appears. There's no reason to think an old dragon couldn't take on a much younger shape, but you know youth and you age, and everything in the way she moves screams of youth.

Instead of speaking, you follow her, and you watch her, the way she looks when she doesn't feel your eyes on her, and the way she looks when you've just caught her watching you. The blush on her cheeks, afterward, is a little too gray-tinged to be human, but suits her perfectly well.

At the edge of the kingdom is a mountain range. You follow her up and up, for days and weeks, until you've left even the narrowest paths behind, and push through thorns and brush to find yourself at the edge of a cliff, with the greenest of valleys below it.

"Now what?" you ask.

She looks surprised. Perhaps she should; even once you left the kingdom, you haven't asked her much. Until now, you haven't quite cared. Where you're going, what's going to happen to you...none of it seemed to matter, in the wake of your loss. But this place is beautiful, so beautiful; you've never traveled, never seen anything like it outside of illustrations in dusty old books. It seems to reignite something you'd thought had been extinguished forever when your sister died.

"Now," the girl says, but her voice squeaks, and she has to begin again. "Now it's up to you."

"Am I to choose how you're to devour me?" you ask, and in that moment you're doing something you hadn't planned to: looking around for anything that might serve as a weapon, reaching for the dagger that hasn't been strapped to your thigh since your sister grew ill. "That seems a unique cruelty."

"No-o," the girl says.

"What am I choosing, then?"

"Whether you're to stay for a little while, or become like me and stay longer," she says, and that's when and how the rest of the spaces in-between arrange themselves, everything in the texts that never quite made sense, slotting into their place.

"...Become like you?" you ask, because you can't assume you understand, not in this.

"Whatever you choose, please don't jump to your death," she says. "Even if you don't want to come to me. I've heard princesses do, sometimes, and it sounds as if it would be dreadful for the both of us."

Her voice creaks again when she says it. A black tear runs down her face, leaving a gray trail. You guess something else you never suspected (and it is only a guess, for she's given you no other sign it might be true...but still, you're sure, as sure as you've ever been about anything): "You're grieving, too."

"My eggmate," she says. "My sister. She's why I took so long to come for you. I'm sorry."

She comes toward you quickly, presses a kiss to your mouth, itself so quick you barely realize it's happening until she steps away again. She walks toward the cliff's edge, glances at you, then steps off...and before you can run to the edge to see where she's gone, a dragon rises in the air, black as ink with eyes that flash gold.

That creaking voice suits her more now, as she says, "Will you come to me?"

No way to know what will happen if you don't. No way to be certain what will happen if you do. You think you know. You think you can see it, the ways you could grow together, a shared grief that could become something much more. It's not something you would have believed when you were a child; it's not something you could have believed even a few months ago.

It's not something you're sure you believe now, but you have nothing to lose, and you (and a kingdom, perhaps, but you've seen enough today to wonder what lies the lizards of old might have spoken) have so much to gain.

You walk toward her, eyes on her eyes, not looking at the ground below. You know when you've reached the cliff's edge when her eyes widen. You don't hesitate to take the next step...

And there's a moment when it's hard, and painful, everything inside stretching or squeezing, something new bursting from your back, a heat and a screaming pressure that makes you wonder if you're not being devoured after all. But then it's finished, quickly as it began, and you rise in the air beside her. You're no longer what you were, a princess fighting against your fate, or a sister debating on whether or not to accept it; you don't know what you are now, either, or what you will be in the future...but when the dragon turns to fly across the valley, and beckons for you, it's with a lighter heart than you once could have imagined that you follow.


End file.
